Php is still under active development, and has seen a lot of architectural changes at the language level over the last decade that have seen real benefits.
Now, imho, it still isn't a good language, but I wouldn't call it "old". It's not COBOL or FORTRAN where the people who wrote a lot of the mission-critical stuff that banks, research labs, hospitals, and government rely on died 20+ years ago.
A lot of it not receiving investment doesn't come at the language project level, but the individual project level. Accounting likes to pretend that the maintenance portion of the SDLC doesn't exist past a certain point because "what about the shareholders!?" and there are, to date, very few incentives for them to look at the problem in any other way. Let's say you run a Php application that's got Php2Shell vulns and you want to patch it but the only way to do that is to shift major versions, meaning a rewrite of some or all of the code. The code "works fine" according to the bean counters, and there's nothing saying they'll get fined or jailed if a breach occurs as a result, so your project doesn't get funded.
What can i do in Jai i cant in, say Zig? I have never use Jai so im curious. I really how Haxe does metaprogramming, its incredibly powerfull. But not sure how Jai compares.
In Haxe i can pretty much do anything, run code, generate code, i even built an openapi doc on compile time just from types.
PHP is ONLY popular because of mainly wordpress. Usage outside the big CMS are minimal at best, in 2026. I dont see much greenfield / PHP jobs that are not legacy software these days.
There's very little green-field PHP being written, but there's an awful lot of the Internet that was written over the last 30 years, and there's also a lot of very popular turn-key software (eg. WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB) that gets redeployed on new sites by people who just want something user-friendly that works.
I dont see much Hack out in the wild. Its basically only Meta that uses it for facebook. Also kind of funny that PHP was so BAD that they actually had the write their own language.
Nah. There is legacy, then there is the (now dying) wordpress/drupal/ shops that still run PHP. Custom apps are not done in PHP, unless its a (usually) unskilled dev who knows no better.
With AI, there is little need for PHP in 2026, even for the novice dev. The onl thing PHP had in the early 2000s was the FTP deployment story, but that has long faded. I van deploy a go binary WAY easier than a PHP application.
No way. Forums are still incredibly popular. Something like RedFlagDeals has an entire business based around their forum and get close to 40m page views per month and more than 3m uniques.
And there are at least 3 other hugely popular php based forums that I occasionally check — and those are just for my own niche interests.
Im going to give this a go. Im using berkeley mono, so this is up my alley. What colorscheme are you using in the examples? I tend to find that font + colorscheme goes hand in hand.
This is probably going to be banned in EU, like the cyber truck. But, yeah.. kund of meh looking design and obviously i will have nothing to do with anything elon related.
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